The purpose of this article is to compare the results of the implementation of regulatory legal acts related to state policy in higher education, adopted for the period of 2000-2020, with the developed priority areas in education. According to the reports on the results of the activities of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation for the same period, the priority areas in higher education and the results of legislative framework functioning for the period under study were analyzed. As a result, four stages of state policy in higher education were identified (such grouping is determined by the periods of validity of the considered regulatory legal acts), including documents that regulate the education system as a whole and are narrowly focused on higher education. It should be noted that the implementation of the fourth stage has not yet been completed due to the fact that the period of validity of regulatory legal acts ends in 2020; therefore, several scenarios of the course of events were made up. Based on this study, an approach was formed to assess the conformity of priority areas and the results of state policy in the field of higher education, which helped to identify “bottlenecks” in the control over the implementation of the defined priorities.